Jared al'Medar
Character Name: Jared al'Medar Place of Birth/Raising: Arafel Age: 30 Description: Jared is 6"2 tall, slender but muscular built and moves with the graceful elegance of a wildcat approaching its prey. Once he had been handsome and in a way he still is if it wasn´t for his missing right eye and a long scar marring his face. To hide that he always wears a black eye patch to cover it. He would never forget how this was done to him though. Who was to blame. The One Power and the Aes Sedai. He´s a very calm, coldly calculating person, who always is cautious about every move people around him make. He´s very pensive and thinks everything through, despising haste. He doesn´t feel comfortable around people and tries to avoid them. He is troubled by gaps in his memory, which are often filled with memories of other men, other lives before him. Though it often startles him, Jared has learned to deal with and use those memories recognizing that often they were the only thing keeping him alive in battles he should have died in. He´s a skillful armsman but he only kills if necessary and mostly members of the White Tower or its followers, on which he wants to take revenge for what has happened to him. = Character History = All around him lightning struck. It was as if they were everywhere at once. His men fell like flies being washed away by a horse´s tail. All around him, moans and screams of Children being injured or dying. A Hundred Children powerless against only a handful of Darkfriends and one Aes Sedai. One! How could her power so devastating? Why had the Light abandoned them? Reining in his white stallion sharply with one hand, his long sword whirling about and dashing after one fleeing Darkfriend, Jared suddenly stopped dead. “Doialan!! Watch out!”, he called out seeing the Aes Sedai directing another strike of lightning towards his Second in Command. His Second and his best friend. Not able to think about what he was doing, he dashed toward Doialan, intending to warn him as he apparently didn´t hear him shouting. This was his biggest mistake, he knew. One time he didn´t watch his own back for a friend´s sake and it was too late. Instead of striking at Doilan, the Aes Sedai changed the direction of her blow and it hit him directly in his face. He didn´t feel the blow lifting him out of the saddle and falling down. All he felt was agonizing pain stabbing through his right eye. His head was ripped off his rump and through a red blurring veil, he faintly spotted dead and injured Children lying sprawled on the ground all around him. His agonized screams died in his throat, which suddenly seemed too tight to even breath. All he felt was pain. Agony. He was about to die. “Light! Not now...”, the world exploded in fire and he wanted to cry out in pain, but his voice was drowned in his own blood and all around him vanished in blackness. Panting and soaked in sweat Jared sat bolt upright in his bed. It always took him a moment to realize where he was and he always wondered how it came that he wasn´t dead. “I should have died out there. With my men. I should”, he thought, his hand unconsciously touching his face. Although he had seen it so many times before, he still touched his black eye patch, covering the empty eye socket where once his eye had been before it was scorched out by the One Power tenderly and some disbelief about what actually had happened during this battle in Baerleon he kept on having nightmares about, still remained. Disbelief and frustration about having lost nearly every memory he had had about his life before this nearly fatal battle in Baerleon. Thinking about it always filled him with nearly unbearable hatred. Hatred on the Aes Sedai who had done all of that to him. Who had killed his men. Who had killed Doialan. Who had burned his eye out but didn´t let him die honorably. Who had burned out half his memory. He knew he should thank the Light for having let him survive this battle and that he had been found by his companions after the Aes Sedai and her fellow Darkfriends had escaped having devastated the Children´s Division who were supposed to kill them. Only a handful of men of the division he had commanded in this battle had survived and it was only for them that he was found, brought back to the camp to tend his wounds. Yet somehow he still wished they had left him there to die. When he had regained consciousness after the battle for the first time he didn´t even know who he was and what had happened. All he knew was that he should have died and that somehow his right eye was covered with a thick bandage and he wasn´t allowed to take it off. In fact the Children who tended him had to tie his arms and legs to the bedposts to stop his enraged struggling and demanding how he came here, what they were doing and that he commanded them to take that bandage off his face. But memories returned only slowly and with wide gaps in it. He didn´t know if all of them really were his memories or if most of them had just been fever dreams he had had after the wound in his head had infected. It took him weeks to fully recover from his injuries and the fever that followed. During that time he got more and more enraged about the men tending him not allowing him to look into a mirror to see his face. He knew that something was wrong and noticed the pained and embarrassed looks the men gave him when changing the bandages covering the right side of his face. After all at least some of his memories returned. He remembered that he was Jared al´Medar, Captain of the Children of the Light. He knew what had happened that fateful night in Baerleon. But almost nothing more. Only scraps of memories of his childhood and youth and the time before he had joined the Children of the Light flashed in his mind now and then. He remembered playing snakes and foxes and later stones in the streets of Whitebridge, he remembered dreaming of having adventures and becoming a blademaster when he was a boy. And he remembered leaving home in his early youth to be apprenticed as a guardsman at a Palace of which he found out later must have been the Lion Palace of the Queen of Andor. But how he had come to leave the Palace and joined the Children of the Light, remained hidden. Instead of those memories what seemed to be another man´s memories, several men´s in fact, filled those gaps and in some way Jared knew he had been every single one of these men in a previous life. He didn´t know how or why he had those memories. He only knew he had them and better them than none at all. The day came when Jared was judged strong enough to be allowed to get out of bed and to have a first look on his face. After preparing himself for something very bad the last weeks, it was yet a shock when he looked into a mirror for the first time. Where once his right eye had been, now only an empty socket remained, a nearly fully healed wound and a long scar marring the right side of his face. Sending everyone out with an empty yet steady voice, Jared put the mirror down trying to forget what he had just seen. “I´ll never be able to fight again! Light help me! I´m a cripple! Oh Light!”, he thought despairingly. He couldn´t prevent himself picking the mirror up once more to look again though. Suddenly rage overwhelmed him and he hurled the mirror away, not caring about its shattering in a thousand pieces. After a while Jared managed to compose himself again and forced himself to think rationally again. “The Light won´t help me. I´m the only one who can help myself”, with those words he tore a long strip of his shirt apart and wound it around his head to cover what had once been his right eye. Sending a anxious-looking private to get him a black eye patch, while he buckled his sword and took his quarterstaff, Jared walked out of his tent. “Dare anyone call me a cripple not able to fight. What two cautious eye sees, only one even more cautious can as well. I won´t give in to you, Aes Sedai! Hear me? I won´t give in!”, the last words he cried out earning startled looks from the Children nearby. Yet even if they had had their doubts about him at the beginning, they soon saw that his missing eye didn´t really slow or hinder his ability to fight and to command armies. In a way Jared´s skill had even highly improved since the gaps in his memories were filled by memories of other men, earlier lives and their knowledge and skill had not only saved him once in battle. Although he now avoided people and had grown suspicious about everyone around him, the Children of the Light serving under him did have great respect and not only a little admiration for their Captain on whom they knew they could rely, even when thy felt the only thing keeping him alive was his hatred and urge to take revenge on Aes Sedai and the White Tower. “I won´t give in to you, Aes Sedai! Hear me? I won´t give in!” Category:Biographies Category:Children of the Light Bios Category:Army of the Light Bios